Dance of Life

[QUEUED MUSIC BEGINS, CHOPIN'S OP. 64, NO. 1]

[MOLTO VIVACE]

Mucho molto vivace!

My life begins; my performance begins. My life — performed via Chopin's "One-Minute Waltz."

I don't wait for the curtains to open. Instead, I enter Stage Center through them, as if bursting through the caul and destined for good luck. I am doing somersaults. I'm head over heels ten times, one for each maternal centimeter of dilation. I don't land on my feet. I land on my head, for that is how I led my somersault entrance — head over heels.

[CURTAINS OPEN BEHIND ME]

As Chopin's fingers are fleeting, so is my attempt to sit up, in time with the 420 quarter notes per minute to make his 2-minute "opus" fit into 60 seconds. The conductor's baton is a blur.

This pace is rushed, yet so is life, as I will learn: my dance of life, compressed into one minute. Movements are accelerated: hardly a waltz; more like a salsa:

Basic Turning Left, Basic Turning Right

Underarm Turn

Underarm Release and Basic

Throw Out

140 measures long with one fifteen-measure repeat included, and thus my life — my opus — would have to be played at almost 420 quarter notes per minute for it to play out completely within that single minute. I am up to the challenge! What choice do I have? What? Get born then die? What kind of life is that?

What kind of dance is that?

Schooling changes the dance as the cadence of a bolero ensues, but again, at 420 quarter notes a minute, so it's more like a precipitous tinkling than the steadfast water torture of a true bolero. Such is school, a tedium — relentless — reaching toward the final climax, whereupon the cymbals crash and the orchestral denouement segues into something else.

Because now I have met the love of my life.

With that, my swing dance begins as I lift my partner, spin her, and flip her. Like any dancefloor swing dance, we are both hip and cool, with echoes, deep down, of the Foxtrot.

We separate to allow my wife to mother our children, as she veers Stage Left in a graceful ballet that soon deteriorates into gravitas and pain. Her ballonné morphs into an arabesque, slowing into an adage thrice, one for each of our children. Over ten years of married life, compressed into ten seconds of enchainment, childhood and early family life come together as her ballet pirouettes back to me, allowing assemblé.

Our trouble and strife strike a tandem counterpointing between us, and our song flows abruptly from ballet to the body, action, space, time, and energy of breakdancing, with two daughters entering Stage Right and a son entering Stage Left.

The dance troupe among us begins our frenzy of dervishes, colliding with one another. As we serially land hard, some of us rise stronger, but some don't rise at all, awaiting a partner to take them by the hand.

One by one, each of our daughters and our son in our troupe exit Stage Right, and we are left to assume the cadence of a Gangsta 2-step, a fugue of the grief, relief, and joy of our empty nest. It transitions into the dance of freedom, freeform movements absent any established methodology.

But it is interrupted by a pretty ballerina entering Stage Left.

We are squaredanced away from her by the centrifugal motions of my wife, but the ballerina follows. The timbre of Chopin sinks a dozen octaves but counterintuitively quickens in rhythm with its coincident increase in volume.

I choose the correct dance, however, as the intruder falls away Stage Right, unrequited, her dissonant accompaniment of shrill brass strains fading with her.

For one brief interlude of seconds, another dance troupe accrues, grandchildren entering from the audience seats to join us. Just as quickly, after a feverish ensemble frug, a Cupid Shuffle emerges, family-tied. As often happens, each dancer matures into rogue terpsichorean departures as they exit again, Stage Front, back into the audience to watch our final dance.

While our cadence maintains to fit the minute, the pitch wavers lower as our stage direction to depict our golden years. While the dance is still quick, the movements cover less distances, swirls, and arcs. Akimbo arms lock in place, each of us, arm-in-arm, engenders a final tandem spin on the dance floor, leaping into a split that lands us together on the ground, exhausted, our dance of life spent.

[THE LAST NOTE OF CHOPIN'S OPUS 64 SOUNDS, SUSTAINED AS A FINAL FADE, DROWNED OUT BY THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE]

[FROM THE AUDIENCE;] Standing ovation.

[THE CURTAINS CLOSE]

And this is why I won't do two shows a night!

______________________________

THE ART:

The Dance of Life is an expressionist painting by Edvard Munch in 1899. A metaphorical representation of life’s arc from youth to old age, it reflects from innocence and youth to sensuality to suffering.

THE MUSIC:

Frédéric Chopin's Waltz in D-flat major, Op. 64, No. 1, "Valse du petit chien," is popularly referred to as the Minute Waltz. It was dedicated to the Countess Delfina Potocka.